A Bird's Lament:
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Inspired by the works of Moondog, me, Sinclair, and Ashna wanted to explore the idea of progress and the ghosts it leaves behind. The bones buried by a world constantly under construction.
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In a near future where pigeons have disappeared, we create a small eulogy for the abandoned rock dove as it is immortalized as digital memory.
The original setup was planned to have three monitors while incorporating Sinclair's portable CRT and the live camera CRT. The three monitors ended up being a hassle to obtain within the IDM program so I ended up making my own with cardboard and black paint. I then used Isadora to projection map our display shuffler onto these stand-ins.
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Of course I then learned the agony of having to constantly reset installation setups, especially concerning mounted projectors and the larger fabric backdrop we used for the final reveal, in which the pigeons contained in the screens would take off as one and, through the projector, fly out of the bounds of the monitors and inhabit the room itself
The total show was around 10 minutes, as the shuffling clips of pigeons across the multiple screens served as a visual accompaniment to a set of recorded voices. It opened with a computer generated, documentarian narration of the history, domestication, and extinction of the pigeon, establishing an impersonal history. A relationship to an artifact. An educational topic.
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We then transitioned to personal stories. These were recorded by ourselves and close friends. Of anecdotes and childhood memories and simple tones of affect. Even in use, the terminology of "document", "record", "capture", create a burial for the digitized tomb. How a looping video is taxidermy in numbers.
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We are continuing to work on this project, at least on my end I'm planning to fabricate a better interface and way of experiencing this small story we are telling. We used a MIDI touchpad to let the audience choose what stories they heard but I want to find a better way to integrate the flow into aesthetic.
And again, huge thanks to Sinclair for being a hoarder and Facebook Marketplace Fiend, his CRT's were a pleasure to work with despite the cable adapter misery we had to endure. We also had a desktop Macintosh to use but it wouldn't operate as a monitor and we tabled the idea of preloading video onto a disk. The CRT's were able to run direct display though HDMI thanks to truly esoteric cable converters.
I truly miss RadioShack.